Family History in the Pale of Settlement

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Art for the Movie Theatres: early 1940s

This week I want to backtrack to Diana’s art when she lived in Toronto, before she attended the Art Students League in New York.

As a young woman, Diana worked as an usherette for the local movie theatres. You can find my post about her job at Proud to Be an Usherette. But Diana had another job for the local theatres. She was a film poster artist. Her posters were posted outside and inside the movie theatres.

The other day I wondered if she had ever wanted to be a full-time artist for one of the movie studios, but when I looked at the list of artists the studios used for any length of time they were all men.

These posters were painted (mainly in 1942) in Toronto. Here is 20-year-old Diana posing with one of them.

The “poster show cards,” as Diana referred to them, were painted on beaverboard, and most of them were 40×60. She rented some of them out to the 20th Century Theatre chain in Ontario, Canada. However, Century claimed they lost the posters and never returned any of them to Diana.

5 thoughts on “Art for the Movie Theatres: early 1940s”

These are incredible! I hope she was well compensated. I am surprised that the movie studios didn’t supply local theaters with the posters. Even today there are always huge posters in theaters showing what is and will be playing.

I love your stories about her. I wish I could find more details about my ancestors, like what they excelled at or what their personalities were. All I have is a genealogy chart with marriages and births.